Nowadays, personal computers have experienced great growth and are now rapidly gaining in popularity. Due to the amazing power of personal computers, personal computers are developed to have various functions. For example, the person computers are widely used for playing multimedia files. In addition, the person computers are used to make a presentation in a meeting. By incorporating a presentation program (e.g. PowerPoint) to edit and play slide files containing texts, pictures, images, songs or other effects, the lecturers or the presenters may directly display information in the form of a slide show. Alternatively, when a multimedia playback program is executed, the movies, song files and the like will be reproduced by the personal computer.
For facilitating the user to control playback of multimedia files, the manufactures have developed a variety of remote controllers for remote operations of the multimedia files. Typically, the remote controller for playing multimedia files includes a controller body and a receiver. The controller body may assert a playback control signal. The receiver is connected to the host computer for receiving the playback control signal and transmitting the playback control signal to the host computer for controlling playback of the multimedia files. For portability and storability, the controller body and the receiver are designed to have reduced volume. Moreover, the controller body can be combined with the receiver and stored in an external slot (e.g. a PCMCIA slot or an EXPRESS slot) of a notebook computer.
Generally, the main body of the remote controller has many buttons to be triggered to implement desired functions while playing the multimedia files. For example, by pressing down specified click buttons of the remote controller, “Page Down”, “Page Up”, “Slide Show” and “Blank” functions are executed accordingly. For meeting the ergonomic demand of pressing the button by the user's thumb, all buttons need to have sufficient areas. In addition, as the number of buttons on the main body is increased, the operating modes of the remote controller are increased and thus the remote controller is relative large in size. On the contrary, if the number of buttons on the main body is decreased and the size of the remote controller is reduced, the operating modes of the remote controller are decreased. As a consequence, when the remote controller is designed, the purpose of decreasing the button number and the purpose of reducing the size of the main body are compromised.
Therefore, there is a need of providing a remote controller capable of controlling playback of a multimedia file in many operating modes, in which the remote controller is small in size and thus convenient for storage.